Bay's Island Not Worth Visiting

Rating: Null/10 (24 December 2005)

There are certain things in this world one can count on: the sun will rise in the East, the swallows will return to Capistrano, Old Faithful will erupt right on schedule, and Michael Bay will ruin any piece of material he gets his hands on, ruin it spectacularly. The latest proof of this iron-clad certainty is The Island, a film whose scenario might have been the stuff of which cautionary sci-fi magic is made, but we'll never know now because Bay has bled every last drop of intelligence out of it, yielding up yet another loud, obnoxious, idiotic disaster.
Could we have expected anything else? Perhaps our hopes are raised for a moment in the early passages of the film: we watch as plucky Ewan McGregor begins to realize something is wrong with his reality, one where identically-clad, creepily cheerful people wander the antiseptic confines of earth's last living colony, a massive complex sealed off from the mysteriously contaminated outside world. Perhaps, for a moment, we think the movie will be serious about rendering this illusory paradise, one where people are protected from harm at the price of their souls; but then we realize that we should've known better, that with Michael Bay at the helm the film's tone will be naggingly silly, that any potential within the scenario, the characters, will be frittered away in the name of cheap thrills, low-brow humor and dorky romance.
McGregor quickly discovers the truth about the complex: that the tenants are not in fact survivors of a plague, but clones engineered to provide body parts for their "sponsors," rich people living in the "real world", who have been conned by the evil corporation (always has to be one of those) into believing their "insurance policies" are merely vegetables being kept in cold-storage, their organs waiting to be "harvested." This revelation naturally doesn't sit well with McGregor who, along with equally plucky companion Scarlett Johansson, flees the underground facility for 2019 Los Angeles, only to be pursued by a shady operative played by Djimon "Don't Call Me Agent Girard; Okay Call Me Agent Girard" Hounsou.
Someone obviously had a clever idea for a sci-fi plot somewhere along the way; and they may even have been smart enough to see the wit in this idea, the allegorical potential of it (Are we not all clones awaiting our turn in paradise? Well are we not?). And Michael Bay may even be smart enough to have seen the same potential - except that Mr. Bay is obviously not capable of the subtlety that would've been required to make something smart and funny and thematically relevant out of the story, and goes the obvious route instead, expending his energies working out car-chases. The problem with Bay, beyond the fact that he's clearly a knucklehead, is that his styling is really not cool anymore, that his movie just seems so damn 1998. Bay is the only person in the world who thinks his trademark low-angle shots of men with guns against soaring skyscrapers are still neat-looking (at least he abstains from the old "slow-motion-shot-of-someone-walking-away-from-an-exploding-vehicle" bit). The '80s/early '90s action films of Ridley Scott, particularly Black Rain, have this datedness to them that is amusing by itself (Michael Douglas's mullet in Black Rain gets belly-laughs), but Bay's datedness has not yet gotten to the point where it's funny. His movie gives off the vibe of something made by someone who hasn't been paying attention to what's been happening action-movie-wise in the last few years, who thinks audiences are still going ga-ga over the same stuff they did back when The Rock was the last word in shoot-em-ups. Didn't Bay see The Matrix? Lord of the Rings? Even Spielberg rolls with the punches, but Bay seems trapped in some time-warp where it will always be the late '90s, and he will always be the action maven of the moment.
Bay strands his movie and his actors in shallow water, leaving them to fend for themselves. Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson are given the thankless task of playing a pair of dopey over-grown children (the clones are kept at the mental level of grade-school kids, presumably to keep them from rebelling; the guys who run the complex must not know very many grade-school kids) who are just learning about things like kissing and flying motorcycles; the actors are forced to react with wide-eyed wonderment at everything, and their efforts are less than convincing. McGregor seems neutered, and Johansson, despite looking ravishing in every shot, comes across shrill and unengaged. Such half-assed performances result from having a director who cares nothing about nuance, who is unable to mine a scenario for any nuggets of human interest, or wit, or philosophy. There's something of interest hiding inside The Island, a movie about how human beings are more than the sum of their parts, but the man who made it is simply not able to see it, or if he is, doesn't know how to bring it to life on the screen.